 | Dramatic Results - Math in a Basket Students in Dramatic Results' Math in a Basket program have the opportunity to plan, design, and make actual reed baskets from scratch. In this unique program, students become familiar with art and design concepts to create functional art. Math in a Basket curriculum meets California content standards for both Visual Art and Language Arts. Students master skills in measurement, algebraic formulas and geometric concepts as they work with their basketry dimensions to find the surface area, perimeter, and volume of each basket. Students also work directly with artists from a variety of cultures to learn the ceremonial and functional history of basketry. Dramatic Results website: http://dramaticresults.org/ This film is sponsored by the Frieda C. Fox Family Foundation. To see more videos on FCFox non profits visit us at: http://virtualsitevisit.org |
 | Swimsuit Show | Semifinal Stage | Miss Colombia Pageant 2008 Long live the Queen! Michelle Rouillard Estrada, Miss Cauca, has become the new Miss Colombia. Even though Colombia gained its independence from a royal regime, it seems as the nation still regrets not having continued the whole royalty thing. Who forgot to name Bolivar the first Colombian king? Having made such a regrettable mistake, Colombia has spent decades trying to make up for its royal absence by crowning women left and right between all four corners of the nation. The national beauty pageant is only one amongst many. Colombia has all sorts of honorable and sovereign royal figures, from the international queen of coffee, to the queen of the potato. Towns can have queens, festivals can have queens, even vegetables can have their own queens. All these queens receive crowns, which they wear proudly as they wave to their constituents which have now granted them a mandate to support the um advancement of the sugar cane, or the pork skin, or whatever it is that they have become queens of. Regardless of the extension of the multiple Colombian royal lines, the nation seems to never get tired of the celebration of these pageants and the culture surrounding them. The most prominent of them all is the national pageant that occurs every year in Cartagena. The high society of Colombia unites every November for the event. Starting the week prior to the gala, news coverage becomes almost exclusively about the pageant, with hours of broadcast, and big print spreads dedicated to the competition. Reporters that specialize on pageantry have a wide range of techniques to measure the performance of the candidates for the throne, from thermometers in which the aspiring queens get colder or hotter, to complex point systems that use the wisdom of algebraic processes and which allow these expert reporters to make predictions about the results. The queens from all over the country have to participate in a variety of events from the bathing suit competition, to the traditional attire competition. In the process they are given awards for all sorts of qualities, from being the most photogenic, to being the most friendly. Colombians follow almost with religious devotion every step to the crown. Colombias obsession with pageantry might just be the clearest example of the deeply entrenched patriarchal power dynamics of Colombian society. People love having this women parade themselves as every little detail of who they are, how they speak, how flat their stomach is, how many plastic surgeries it took to get that perfect nose, are widely discussed by the media and around the TV sets all throughout the country. Of course, the excuse is that the process is not only done for the viewing pleasure of the audience, but rather, because Colombia must have an honorable representation at Miss Universe. Granted, the pageant of the Universe, provides an interesting public diplomacy opportunity to promote the country in a positive light. But in Colombia, there is little concern for that. Rather, Colombians grow up knowing that our queen has only gotten promoted to the top throne once, in 1958 when Luz Marina Zuluaga became the ruler of the entire Universe. Colombia has been second many, many times; most recently this very year, and most infamously, during a three-year second place streak in the early 90s. Colombians are well aware of this, and do not like it at all. So every year, once more, the nation convenes to try again and hope that the elected representative will rise to universal stature. For Michelle Rouillard Estrada, nothing less is acceptable. Well, unless she does achieve world peace, or something like that. |
 | How to make fractals without a computer I've heard many reports that this video isn't working. It looks like certain videos across YouTube are having problems. Here is a workaround: Go to this: (there is a url appendix "&fmt=18" that denotes the high quality version (which doesn't exist)) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj9pbs-jjis&fmt=18 THEN click on the "watch in normal quality"link at the bottom right corner of the video. It should run now. This appears to work in both Firefox 3 and Safari. Bad YouTube. --------------- Video feedback is a well-known phenomenon. If you hook a camera up to a TV and then point it at the TV, you get an infinite regression of images. However, you can use the same feedback phenomenon with multiple displays to make fractals. By displaying multiple smaller copies of what the camera sees, photographing that cluster of copies, and then repeating the process, you essentially create the self-similar structure seen in fractals. By moving and rotating the camera and projectors, you can create a very wide variety of fractal images. The images seen in this video are not software-processed in any way. The camera is plugged in directly to the projectors. The pulsing and color shifting comes from the white balance andgain control of the camera. In this setup, we're "computing" the fractal by using light on a wall as memory and the physical geometry of the path taken by the light into the camera and out from the projector as the processor to calculate the appropriate affine transformations. Given that both TV cameras and video projectors were around back in the late 1940s, it's possible that someone could have done this sort of setup at the dawn of the computer age. |
 | Axiom - The Dumbing Down of our Future Debate link:- http://axiomgate.proboards61.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=kampf&thread=135 From Wiki:- Dumbing down is viewed either as a pejorative term for a perceived over-simplification of, amongst other things, education, news and television, or as a statement of truth about real cultural trends in education and culture. Some authorities believe that the audience — be it of television or print media — is being fed a mass-produced, poor quality, and populist diet that leads to an ever-decreasing audience attention span. These ideas have been in circulation for many decades in the social science literature on mass culture argued, for example, by Richard Hoggart, Rosenberg and David Manning White, and Raymond Williams. The sentiment has its roots in the Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis approach to culture, particularly the former's Culture and Anarchy. The concept "dumbing down" can point to a variety of different things but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education, and thought, a decline in creativity and innovation, a degradation of artistic, cultural, and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard, and the trivialisation of cultural, artistic, and academic creations. The term can be seen as subjective since what is labelled as "dumbed down" often depends upon the values of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimised to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture has diminished progressively in the late twentieth century. Education Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees. Psychology and political science are often the key targets in media discourse, although the defender of these subjects argue that the representions of such disciplines are often inaccurate. In the UK, there is now an annual moral panic every August when GCSE and A-level results are released. The pass rate by students has consistently risen for past two decades and Grade inflation is attributed to rising pass rates. Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down (in mathematics as syllabus has been continuously cut during the past year. For example, an algebraic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem). A secondary school physics teacher, Wellington Grey, run Internet petition, stating that "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be." According to him, "Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE.". Few examples he listed ranged from "`Q:why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? A: Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]" to "`Q: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?'"[1] In teaching history, Simon Schama has been accused of 'dumbing down' through his various television series and coffee table books, such as A History of Britain, The Power of Art, and Rough Crossings. Indeed, the term 'Schamafication' has been used to suggest that this is a neologism equivalent to McDonaldization or Disneyfication. And, of course, educationalists are increasingly concerned that Wikipedia itself is becoming a major source of ideas and information, and there are voices to be heard that this internet facility is also contributing to 'dumbing down'. |
 | Axiom - The Dumbing Down of our Future part 2 From Wiki:- Dumbing down is viewed either as a pejorative term for a perceived over-simplification of, amongst other things, education, news and television, or as a statement of truth about real cultural trends in education and culture. Some authorities believe that the audience — be it of television or print media — is being fed a mass-produced, poor quality, and populist diet that leads to an ever-decreasing audience attention span. These ideas have been in circulation for many decades in the social science literature on mass culture argued, for example, by Richard Hoggart, Rosenberg and David Manning White, and Raymond Williams. The sentiment has its roots in the Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis approach to culture, particularly the former's Culture and Anarchy. The concept "dumbing down" can point to a variety of different things but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education, and thought, a decline in creativity and innovation, a degradation of artistic, cultural, and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard, and the trivialisation of cultural, artistic, and academic creations. The term can be seen as subjective since what is labelled as "dumbed down" often depends upon the values of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimised to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture has diminished progressively in the late twentieth century. Education Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees. Psychology and political science are often the key targets in media discourse, although the defender of these subjects argue that the representions of such disciplines are often inaccurate. In the UK, there is now an annual moral panic every August when GCSE and A-level results are released. The pass rate by students has consistently risen for past two decades and Grade inflation is attributed to rising pass rates. Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down (in mathematics as syllabus has been continuously cut during the past year. For example, an algebraic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem). A secondary school physics teacher, Wellington Grey, run Internet petition, stating that "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be." According to him, "Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE.". Few examples he listed ranged from "`Q:why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? A: Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]" to "`Q: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?'"[1] In teaching history, Simon Schama has been accused of 'dumbing down' through his various television series and coffee table books, such as A History of Britain, The Power of Art, and Rough Crossings. Indeed, the term 'Schamafication' has been used to suggest that this is a neologism equivalent to McDonaldization or Disneyfication. And, of course, educationalists are increasingly concerned that Wikipedia itself is becoming a major source of ideas and information, and there are voices to be heard that this internet facility is also contributing to 'dumbing down'. |
 | VH2 - cmu Gurlzzz For High Quality Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BX7PojrqZY&fmt=18 CMU Gurlzzz aren't your average CMU Girls. Digg It! http://digg.com/comedy/CMU_Gurlzzz_Hot_Geeky_Girls_with_Brains_Rapping Struttin down the cut I make this look easy All you CMU boys see me my algebraic skills are off the hEEzy we easy n breezy but not japanesey listen to this rhyme cuz I spit it quick here at cmu were the baddest chicks 'n we dont sleep but it ain't tragic here at carnegie / we make magic not only can I rhyme to this beat let me show you how I use creative suite photoshop and flash, i like to animate yeah we like robots but we're also creative Keeping it real and by real we mean free Goin to museums We're V I P Don't wait in line, no charge for me Just 50 k a year thanks to Carnegie In the name of learning we gonna drop dollars 4 years or more you can call us scholars But that doesn't mean we don't party like ballers We drop lock and pop it like our J Crew collars Class in my sweat pants / Party in my sweat pants Brunch on Sundays at schatz in my sweat pants Rockin my Ugg boots you don't stand a chance Fuck it, lets dance. You wonder how we spit these lines As we read the new york times I stay up to date in all kinds of media CNN blows, yo we use wikipedia Excuse me now I gotta catch up with my blogs (blogs) If you don't like that then I'll throw you to the dogs (dogs) And if you DIGG it, then you my dawg Gizmodo Notcot and technabob If this was Harry Potter I'm the snitch to your seeker I read a lotta books like a fine senorita I like to solves puzzles or a good brain teaser and for final exams I'm a cheetah not a cheater The mercury's risin' I can feel it in my beaker turn down the bunsen burner cause you're hot like a heater I feel our chemistry yo whats the solution Ive had it up to here with crazy pollution global warming's got us hot and its Melting ice caps out in the atlantic We roll up in the hybrid cuz we wanna save the planet Lets go to whole foods so we can shop organic Cruising round the burgh jamming indie rock music Keeping it green, you know that's how we do it recycle / reduce / or try to reuse it You don't recycle? Theres no excuses World of warcraft / my epics are the illest Maxin level 70 because im so ridiculous Pownin' noobz / this ain't rocket science Alterac Valley / I'm with the alliance From the very first meg to the last kilobit Here's one fly chick who likes to write script From coast to coast they ask me to code it I spit it / submit it / and then I upload it Oh I see you there you watch my hips gyrate But let me tell you how I'm an internet pirate Rockin bit torrent wearin' plaid and scarlet You can find me in the Morrison / of Margaret (Maggie mo!) Lyrics by Jenna Steely, Courtney Gooch and Vika Kovalchuk Music By DJ Master Mic Cinematography by Blake Coughenour Sound Recording by Alex Andrews |
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![Don\](images/articles/thumbs/beachrainthumb.jpg "Don\")
